What if your cell phone could detect cancer cells circulating in your blood or warn you of an imminent heart attack? Mobile wireless digital devices, including smartphones and tablets with seemingly limitless functionality, have brought about radical changes in our lives, providing hyper-connectivity to social networks and cloud computing. But the digital world has hardly pierced the medical cocoon.
Until now. Beyond reading email and surfing the Web, we will soon be checking our vital signs on our phone. We can already continuously monitor our heart rhythm, blood glucose levels, and brain waves while we sleep. Miniature ultrasound imaging devices are replacing the icon of medicine—the stethoscope. DNA sequencing, Facebook, and the Watson supercomputer have already saved lives. For the first time we can capture all the relevant data from each individual to enable precision therapy, prevent major side effects of medications, and ultimately to prevent many diseases from ever occurring. And yet many of these digital medical innovations lie unused because of the medical community’s profound resistance to change.
In The Creative Destruction of Medicine, Eric Topol—one of the nation’s top physicians and a leading voice on the digital revolution in medicine—argues that radical innovation and a true democratization of medical care are within reach, but only if we consumers demand it. We can force medicine to undergo its biggest shakeup in history. This book shows us the stakes—and how to win them.
Misha Angrist, Assistant Professor, Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy, and author of Here is a Human Being
“Eric Topol is that rare physician willing to challenge the orthodoxies of his guild. He recognizes that in the U.S., health care business-as-usual is unsustainable. But he does not despair. He bears witness to the rise of Homo digitus and the promise it holds to upend the inefficiencies and dysfunction so entrenched in clinical medicine. The Creative Destruction of Medicine is a timely tour de force. It is a necessary heresy.”
George Church, Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School
“What happens when the super-convergence of smart phones further combines with million-fold lower-cost genomics and diverse wearable sensors? The riveting answer leads compellingly to a call to activism—not only for medical care providers, but all patients and everyone looking for the next ‘disruptive' economic revolution. This future is closer than most of us would have imagined before seeing it laid out so clearly. A must-read.”
Arnold S. Relman, New York Review of Books
“As an introduction for the lay reader to the sophisticated digital technology now being applied to medical care, and as an explanation of the rapidly advancing science of medical genetics and the new revelations from the sequencing of the human genome, Topol's book is a tour de force.”
Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
About the Author
Eric J. Topol, M.D., is professor of innovative medicine and the director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, California. Trained at Johns Hopkins University, he conducted one of the first trials of a genetically engineered protein for treating heart attacks, and was the founder of the world's first cardiovascular gene bank at the Cleveland Clinic. He lives with his family in La Jolla, California.
Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Basic Books; 1 edition (January 31, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-13: 9780465025503